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Asus intro Northern Lights notebooks

Aurora Borealis-inspired design, apparently

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Asus obviously searched the stars for inspiration when considering the aesthetics of its latest notebook trio, because the machines supposedly feature a fusion of styles all borrowed from the Northern Lights.

The Aurora Borealis design etched onto the top surfaces of the F50GX and F50Z, available as 15.5in or 16in models, and the 17.3in F70SL is also designed to withstand knocks and scrapes.

Asus’ F70SL comes with the choice of an Intel Core 2 Duo, Pentium, dual-core Celeron or single-core Celeron processor, and packs in 4GB of DDR 2 memory, all tied in to an SiS 671DX chipset.

The machine also has an external Blu-ray combo drive and your choice of either a single HDD, of up to 500GB capacity, or a pair of hard disks for up to 1TB of storage.

Film fans will be attracted to the 16:9 ratio, 1600 x 900 screen, above which rests a 1.3Mp webcam. Pictures can be transferred onto the machine using its Bluetooth 2.1 connection, alternatively you can surf the web over an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi link or cabled Ethernet.

The smaller F50GX and F50Z notebooks both have lower resolution screen - 1366 x 768, to be exact - in both sizes.

Chip choices a-plenty with the Asus trio

However, while the F50GX is supported by an Intel Core 2 Duo, Pentium, dual-core Celeron or single-core Celeron processor with a Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset, the F50Z runs on a dual-core AMD Turion or Athlon 64 CPU and AMD M780G chipset.

Both machines come with 4GB of DDR 2 memory and three HDD capacity options: 250, 320 or 500GB.

Asus has integrated Blu-ray drives into both of the F50 series machines and also equipped them with a 1.3Mp webcam, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Ethernet port and Bluetooth connectivity.